Disclaimer: Terra Nova is not mine.

The days go by much more quickly than he wants them to go. It doesn't seem to matter what he does to try to slow things down or how he tries to enjoy the moments that he has. They just keep slipping away from him, and he doesn't know what to do about that. He is supposed to be happy. He is supposed to be excited. He is supposed to be a lot of things. What he is, mostly, is confused. He might find it a little easier to get his bearings if other people would stop telling him how it is that he is supposed to feel.

He tries not to be nervous. He is almost fifteen now, and that is too old to be scared of going places alone. He tries to tell himself that, but this isn't the same as when he first started running errands or the first time that his grandmother let him go to pick up something from the store by himself. This is a gateway to an entirely different world, and he is supposed to walk up to it and step through it without anyone there beside him that he knows or cares about. That is huge and a different kind of going somewhere alone than most full grown-ups have ever had to face. He thinks that should get him just a little bit of room to not be expected to react the way that everyone else seems to think that they should be allowed to dictate.

They keep telling him that there is no reason to be worried over the process (as if that is what is bothering him about the situation). He knows that there is no reason to be worried about the process. He knows all about it; he has for a long time. Plenty of people have gone through the gate. His father was one of the first of them. He doesn't understand exactly how the rift works (he figures no one really does even though some people try to pretend like they do), but he knows that it works. That is not what is causing him to lose sleep and shrug his shoulders when someone demands that he display some enthusiasm.

He is going to live with his dad, and he hasn't lived with his dad in a long, long time. He should be excited. He is excited about that. He will have his dad in one place where he can always get messages and see him more than the once a year that was so often the case during deployments when he was younger. He just wishes that it didn't have to come as a trade. He wishes he was not leaving his grandfather behind.

It doesn't seem right somehow. Other people get to bring spouses and children with them. He would think that his father should get to bring up to three people as well, but the rules don't work that way. Immediate family only is the deal, and once you are an adult, your parents are no longer considered your immediate family. If he had been a few years older, then his father would not have even been able to have him brought over. He didn't like it, but they all insisted that he needed to go. The representative from the Pilgrimages that had come to speak to him, the person who did his psych evaluation, and everyone else involved in the process kept telling him that he was so lucky to be given this opportunity.

His grandfather insisted that it was the right thing for him to do. Mark wasn't so sure that he was comfortable using the word right to describe it. It did not feel right to him that he was leaving the man all alone. He had done the raising of him (along with his grandmother). His dad had nearly always been deployed, and then he had gone on to Terra Nova. He had been a much loved but much absent part of his life. His grandfather had never been absent.

As for his mother, well, he couldn't even remember her. She had been gone (by her choice) for so long that he could not remember ever having lived anywhere other than his grandparents' apartment. His grandparents had kept some pictures, but he had not really wanted to look at them once he was old enough to realize that she had left him behind. It was ironic that she had left him along with his father based on her assertion that his father had no ambition and would never be going anywhere. She would be going to Terra Nova as well if she had bothered to stick around. He was not supposed to know why she had left, but he had found a copy of her goodbye letter on an old plex that his dad had left behind after a furlough once. If he had ever had any tinge of curiosity about the woman that had given birth to him, then it had disappeared with the perusal of the words that she had used to dismiss him as a burden that she didn't need to have dragging her down.

He hadn't needed her anyway. He had had his grandmother, and she was way better than the woman who had written that letter could ever dream of being. He and his grandfather had gotten each other through losing her. They had said their goodbyes to his grandmother (after a lingering illness) three weeks before they had received the notification that he was to go on the next Pilgrimage.

His grandfather had wept - the happy kind of tears. He had hugged him close and breathed out the word "finally" as years of tension seemed to melt off of his shoulders. Mark did not quite understand it. He knew the man wanted something better for him, but he did not understand why he couldn't want better for himself as well. He wanted to bring him along. He didn't want to leave the only stability he had left in a world that he was leaving behind. His grandfather had always taken care of him. Who was going to be left to take care of his grandfather?

So, no, he wasn't excited the way that they all expected him to be. Did he have to jump up and down and squeal like the girl in the waiting room with him the day that he went for his evaluation had? Why was it not okay for him to think about what he was leaving behind? It didn't mean that he wasn't happy about being with his dad. It didn't mean that he didn't appreciate that he was getting something most people would never have. He understood all of that. Why couldn't they understand that he needed to grieve?